Children of Military Personnel Missing in Action in Southeast Asia

Abstract

Children of wartime prisoners of war (POWs) and those missing in action (MIAs) experience a prolonged, ambiguous stressor that may have long-term effects on their later personal psychosocial adjustment and health—either positively or negatively. What are those effects? Several studies of children of World War II concentration camp survivors suggest there are deleterious second-generational, perhaps even third-generational, residuals of extreme parental trauma (Bergman & Jucovy, 1982; Danieli, 1985, 1988a, 1988b; Rakoff, 1966; Segal, Hunter, & Segal, 1976; Sigal, 1971). To date, no definitive study has been carried out on the long-term effects on Vietnam-era MIA children, although several preliminary efforts have been made to determine what these effects might be (Benson, McCubbin, Dahl, & Hunter, 1974; Boss, 1980, 1988, 1990; Hunter, 1980, 1982, 1983a, 1983b, 1986a, 1986b, 1988). Comparing the Vietnam War MIA situation and the Holocaust tragedy, the reader may also wonder how those two experiences differ in their future effects on surviving family members.

Keywords

Adult Child Military Personnel Military Family Holocaust Survivor Roller Coaster

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... women and children—rebuilding their lives and perhaps building houses of cards with the hands they’ve been dealt ...

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Authors and Affiliations

Edna J. Hunter-King

1

1.Department of Veterans AffairsUSA

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Cite this chapter as:

Hunter-King E.J. (1998) Children of Military Personnel Missing in Action in Southeast Asia. In: Danieli Y. (eds) International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma. The Plenum Series on Stress and Coping. Springer, Boston, MA